


my screams got lost in a paper cup

by slybrunette



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-28
Updated: 2008-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:53:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post S4 finale. She stops screaming. She also stops talking. It's not as though it does her any good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my screams got lost in a paper cup

For the first few days, Claire screams her pretty little lungs out.

The room is more like a cell, 8x10, best guess, and the sole window rests seven feet up on the thick steel door that blocks her exit, high enough that all she ever sees is blank white space. Space that matches the walls of this room. That's all she sees. Ever.

(This is before she starts tearing marks into the walls with too-long fingernails, just to convince herself that she had indeed put up some kind of fight)

Day three, she stops screaming. She also stops talking. It's not as though it would do any good.

They start bringing her food and water more regularly after that. A man in a white lab coat, whose face she can never quite remember after he's gone. Everything's faceless, white, bland, here.

But like a rat in a cage, she learns what silence gets her, she lets them condition her into who they want her to be.

\---

There's a space of time where all she really remembers is patterns on the back of closed eyelids. The light in her eyes, the one that seeps, just out of reach (she tries to blink, tries to open her eyes, but unconsciousness keeps claiming her), changes from white to yellow and orange, and something warms her skin.

The hand on her cheek, soft pressure, feels too much like fire brushing her skin, and she whimpers, turning her head. Rough fingers only move over her chapped lips, before finding their original position, and there's a voice that says her name, gentle, concerned.

"Wake up sweetheart; we need to get moving." The term of endearment is what strikes her most. The accent behind it.

She sucks in a breath, suddenly aware of the burning in her lungs, deprived of air, and her eyes flutter open all on their own.

It'll be the second time in not very long that Sawyer's played savior to her damsel in distress.

\---

People seem to have a lot of questions about where she was, and what happened to her, and her lips just stay pressed tight together. It's overwhelming, terrifying, gratifying all at once. At least they care.

Her self-imposed muteness keeps her from asking about Aaron. It's for the better - she doesn't see him with anyone on the beach and she doesn't think she could handle it if she found out he was gone...or worse.

She does know something happened. It's in the tired faces, the grieving faces, the absent faces that she can't find no matter how hard she looks. After awhile that gets overwhelming too.

Claire doesn't ask when she curls up on the cot in Sawyer's tent. She just does, closing her eyes, finding the darkness far more welcoming.

\---

Sawyer learns slowly. The first day or so he's gentle. The next few he's angry, yelling, doesn't understand. She just sits there with her cheeks red from the sun (she's not used to it - time spent in a trapped in an indoor cage will do that to you) and nervousness.

By the fifth day he tucks a blanket around her shoulders in his tent, says, "I get it; you don't have to talk," shakes his head as he adds, "I do enough of that for the both of us."

He catches her smile, however faint, and there's something like hope in his eyes.

When he goes to leave, her fingers grip his wrist, holds him there. Claire says all she needs to with her eyes.

\---

She knows she'll sleep with him. She doesn't know when or where or why. She just knows she will, something in the recesses of her mind, like the inevitable or fate (fingers tap out that last word in her head, a sullen reminder - her mind, this place, is full of them). Even moving out, moving back to her old tent, isn't going to stop that, but it does make things less awkward.

There's comfort in that, somehow. Knowing something is going to happen before it does. The novelty of that.

\---

There are two distinct groups here: the people who still watch the ocean for signs of boats, who still watch the skies, and the people who are looking toward the jungle, towards the possibility of building from what they have instead of longing for what they don't.

Claire used to walk the shoreline, every day in the afternoons, hands shoved in her pockets as she listened to the birds overhead. She'd hum something distant and childish, something she thought she'd forgotten in adolescence. In her head, she was on the beach back home, and when she closed her eyes she could stay there, her feet finding their own way, a path she'd long since memorized.

Then Charlie died and there were the barracks and hope, before she traded one cage for another. Now that path is just another one of those holes in her memory, something she can't quite fall back into, and she can't bring herself to give it the effort needed to remember, to get that back. That was her then, when she remembered how to smile, when sound used to come out of her when her lips moved.

Sawyer's never been much of a dreamer. "We need to get off this damn beach."

She nods, the smell of salt in the air making her stomach turn sour.

\---

Locke starts lurking, in the shadows at night. He's not welcome, probably knows it too, but that doesn't keep him away.

He sees her, one night when she can't sleep, and the stars and open air feel more welcoming than four material walls. The moonlight casts an eerie glow on his skin when he moves in the foliage, and she shivers, arms wrapped around herself. Her eyes move between her tent and the one next to hers.

She picks the latter.

Sawyer wakes easily, perhaps a little too easily. One small hand on his shoulder and he thrashes like a caged animal. Once awake, his hand encircling her wrist, grip softening, his voice is hoarse as he asks, "Need something Mamacita," like he's forgotten the numerous problems with that sentence.

Her tongue stills in her mouth, but her eyes flick to the opening of the tent and he rises, wordlessly gathering his jeans and his gun. She bites her lip and waits as he slips outside, praying for something (gun shot, silence, she doesn't know).

He isn't gone very long. "Whoever it was got out of dodge. Care to share who you saw?" He pauses, and it's more for effect. He doesn't really expect anything. "Didn't think so."

She lays down then, right where she was sitting, claiming this spot as hers for the night in her own special way. Sawyer doesn't think anything of it, and he's asleep in minutes.

Claire's awake most of the night, every little sound magnified in her head.

\---

During the night she ends up curled against him. His hand travels in his sleep, traces patterns along her skin, comes to settle between her thighs. She moans, just a little, unintentionally, and even that much of a noise seems to startle them both, waking him for the second time.  
Once he figures out why, he can't seem to keep his hands off of her, like he's looking for the right button to press to get her to do it again. Sawyer likes to pretend him and Jack were so very different - but he's been looking to fix her since she came back. He just isn't so obvious about it. It just isn't his life mission.

They move in the dark, flipping so that she's on top, straddling his hips, and if she's shaking a little he pretends not to notice. His grip on her is still tight. She thinks it's supposed to help. The ‘I'm not letting go' kind of thing that he'll never say.

They're good that way, you know. The man who can't put his feelings into words, and the woman who could but chooses not to. Quite a pair.

She allows another moan to slip through her lips, for his benefit, when she comes.

\---

When they make their home in what's left of the barracks things just seem to fall into place. Her old place is gone, his isn't. His roommate is gone; so is hers. They move in together. That's just how it works.

She learns to knit, leftover materials from whoever lived there before. He learns not to ask questions about what. Together they learn how to communicate.

The air cools, turning into January, maybe February, and she comes down with a stomach flu she can't possibly have.

This is not happening.

Not again.

\---

There's no good way to tell him. Wouldn't be words even if they'd come across her lips.

He figures it out with time. She can see it in his eyes, even if he doesn't say anything either.

Juliet comes around a few days after he notices. There's a Dharma station and cold, and Juliet's face that's caught up between a smile and a frown. "You're pregnant. Probably about four months along."

Damn.

\---

Winter turns to spring, to summer.

She isn't scared; she's been here before.

Tears prick her eyes at night, when she thinks about what she's lost. Sometimes that's all she can think about.

\---

It's a boy.

She names him Eli. Prays better luck this time.

\---

A year later, and she still hasn't spoken a word.

One night she starts humming to herself, as she puts him to bed in a crib that was not made by the old man who lingers in the woods, haunting them all. He stops crying and, through process of elimination, she realizes it's her voice that's doing it.

When no one's around she'll sing to him. Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. Always that. She still remembers the words, it just takes her awhile to remember how to speak them (you stay quiet for so long and it becomes a challenge, even if it's by your own doing).

She knows Sawyer stands down the hall, listening. But he's long since stopped trying to get her to speak, accepted that she's fine and this is just the way she chooses to be.

They're fine. For now.

At night, she still listens for helicopter blades to chop through the air and change everything once more.


End file.
